Talk:Mother Gothel/@comment-11284001-20200129051315
By the way, the name “Mother Gothel” seems to be a slight mistake, if rather a brilliant one in terms of pure sound and suggestiveness. When adapting the story of Rapunzel from its literary source (itself based on an anonymous folk tale), the Grimm brothers had their heroine call the “fairy” („Fee“, later changed to „Zauberin“=“sorceress”) who had raised her „Frau Gothel“. „Frau“ is “Ms., Mrs.,” or even just “woman” in 21st century German, but when the Grimms were writing, its meaning was more restricted: it meant “lady,” “my lady,” “dame,” “Madame.” (A “woman” was a „Weib“ (just as Middle English “wyf, wif” had been) and „weiblich“ still means “feminine,” but a „Weib“ in the German of today is a married woman or “wife.”) A mature woman of middle to lower social standing would likely have been called „Mutter“ (“Mother”) or by some occupational title, such as „Amme“=“Nurse, Nanny,” though even by the Grimms’ time this was rather an old-fashioned or countrified usage. Now, the interesting thing about “Gothel” is that it is the product of the Grimms’ nationalist antiquarianism. One of the purposes the Grimms’ had in collecting their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Childrens’ and Household Tales or “Grimms’ Fairy Tales”) was to show that Germany had not borrowed its culture entirely from ancient Rome (this was actually a theory in their day), so they collected as many old stories illustrating ancient German culture as they could. Unfortunately, many of these stories, by the time the Grimms got to them, had been retold so often that their ancient form had been hidden by modern phraseology; so the Grimms deliberately altered them to be as Olde Tyme and Teutonic in form as possible, such as changing fairies into sorceresses as stated above, foreign-based words like „Prinz“ (from French « prince ») to old-fashioned German „Königssohn“ (“son of a king”), and sprinkling in a lot of old-fashioned German words and phrases, such as'' „Göthel“ or ''„Gothel“. When the story was translated into English, „Frau“ was translated as “Mother,” either because she and Rapunzel are deemed to be familiar or in accordance with her perceived lower social status. However, the translator reading the story ran up against the very unfamiliar and old-fashioned word „Gothel“ used in conjunction with a common title, and construed it as a personal name. IT IS NOT. It is, like „Amme“, a very old-fashioned occupational name, meaning, in fact, much the same thing, “Nurse, Nanny, Foster Mother”. So you could actually reasonably translate „Frau Gothel“ as “Madame Foster “ (!)). I don’t know if the Disney research team and writers were aware of this complicated background, but obviously they needed a name for the character, and here was a name she had historically been called. And what a name! “Gothel” is a wonderfully sinister name, with its connotations of “Gothic” mediævalism, horror, magic, mystery, and even a touch of romance: feminine and menacing at the same time. It was a gift to any writer with a villainess in view. Do you guys think that any of this rigmarole belongs in the “Trivia” section above?